Financial service providers can help prevent the exploitation of World Heritage Sites by using spatial analysis to gain a clear overview of economic activity in areas of global ecological significance.
World Heritage Sites (WHS) include some of the most remarkable and most important landscapes on earth, such as the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef and Okavango Delta. They have been internationally recognised as being of ‘Outstanding Universal Value’ and protected under the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention.
Despite representing less than 1% of our planet, WHS are often threatened by potentially damaging commercial activities, such as mining, oil and gas extraction, hydropower plants, road construction, port development, deforestation, agricultural expansion or industrial fisheries.
This report focuses on the concept of spatial finance in understanding threats to natural and mixed World Heritage Sites. Spatial finance is a new and emerging field which integrates geospatial data into financial theory and practice using GIS, remote sensing combined with machine learning. Spatial finance has the potential to transform the availability of independent information in our financial system to better measure and manage Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) risk.
The report presents the latest, global geospatial analysis of key industrial threat to WHS, conducted by WWF. It shows that of the 244 sites (as of 2018) 119 natural WHS (48.8%), have been identified with one or multiple forms of potentially damaging commercial activity (extractives, power plants, and dams) within their boundaries. Of those 24% of WHS are overlapped with mining concessions, with 2% of sites having active mining operations within their boundaries; 16% are overlapped with oil and gas concessions and 23% had power plants located in WHS.
A key challenge facing many resource-rich countries is how to mobilize and effectively use volatile revenues from resource extraction, while addressing social and environmental externalities of mining activities.